by Lisa McKay
That cold Christmas morning, my little brother was selected as first present-elf. Matt pointed at me, laughed, and pulled eighteen rolls of toilet paper out from where he’d hidden them behind the couch.
“Sorry they’re not wrapped,” he said.
Considering I’d just been gifted toilet paper, it wasn’t exactly the lack of wrapping that bothered me.
“They’re a standin present,” Matt said. “Something else is coming, but it didn’t get here in time. And, you know, you didn’t actually have any toilet paper in the house when Lou and I stayed with you.”
He had a point. When Matt and Louise had stopped in L.A. for a visit ten days earlier, I’d been out of toilet paper and, thanks to long days at work, remained so for three days.
“Paper towel works just fine if you rip it up into small enough pieces,” I said, repeating the argument I had used then.
Lou laughed.
“No,” Matt replied, smirking, “paper towel does not work just fine.”
When my turn came around again, my parents were next. The package they handed me was soft. I opened it to find a T-shirt from my favorite clothes store in Australia. There was only one problem: it was huge.
“This is an extra large,” I said, confused, after I checked the tag.
“I told you she wasn’t an extra large, Merrilyn,” Dad said.
“Oh?” Mum said. “I just thought that looked about the right size.”
I held the shirt up against me. It came halfway to my knees.
“What size do you normally wear?” Mum asked.
“Medium!” I said.
“Really?!?” Mum said, “I would have thought you were at least a large.”
“Merrilyn!” my father hissed, kicking her.
I was zero for two, but my sister was next. Michelle is very thoughtful and often keeps an eye out for ways to put people at ease, so it’s perhaps understandable that I failed to take due notice of the grin she wore – one part naughty, one part proud – as she handed me her present. But even if I’d recognized it as such, I’m pretty sure I still wouldn’t have been able to figure out what my younger, married, pregnant sister had wrapped for me so gaily.
It was a book. The complete book of international adoption: A step-by-step guide to finding your child.
“What?” Michelle said into the stunned silence that preceded laughter all around the family circle. “You’ve always said that if you don’t get married you’ll think about adopting kids. Now you know where to start. And it was on sale for five bucks!”
Los Angeles, USA
I laughed in that moment on Christmas morning. The funny factor outweighed the sting I felt, sitting there in my flannel pajamas, looking around at everyone else neatly paired up with someone. But by April, when my early-morning phone alarm reminded me of my July wedding in Australia, it was getting less funny. I was beginning to worry that Michelle’s Christmas present had set the theme for the entire year, for just a week earlier I had also been blindsided by the solitary present I had to open on the morning of my thirty-first birthday.
My birthday started early. Sadly, this was not because of excitement related to piñatas, upcoming parties, or trick candles adorning strawberry cheesecake. It was because I had to drive a friend to the airport at 5 a.m. after a weekend spent celebrating Robin’s long-awaited wedding.
I hadn’t planned anything to mark this birthday – I’d known my California crowd would be all partied out after spending most of the weekend at various wedding-related events. So I had fully intended to get up early, do the airport run, and come back and get straight to work on the final draft of my first novel. I’d already been working on rewriting the novel for a year, and the final copy-editing deadlines were looming. But when I got back from the airport at 6:30 a.m. that Sunday and looked between my desk and my pillow, it wasn’t even a close call.
I was so going back to sleep.
As I climbed back into bed I ripped open the padded yellow envelope that had arrived four days earlier adorned with stern instructions that it was to be saved until my birthday.
Inside that envelope was another book, posted to me by one of my best friends from Australia, Tash.
The title of this book was Spinsters Abroad: Victorian Lady Explorers. On the cover was a small brunette. She was wearing a white lacy dress buttoned to her chin and a pith helmet. She was shading this unlikely ensemble with a parasol and stepping daintily through the jungle.
“What spurred so many Victorian women to leave behind their secure middle-class homes and undertake perilous journeys of thousands of miles, tramping through tropical forests, caravanning across deserts, and scaling mountain ranges?” asked the back cover. “And how were they able to travel so freely in exotic lands, when at home such independence was denied to them?”
This scintillating manifesto on international singleness was still lying on my bedside table five days later when my phone woke me with its shrill commands to get engaged, and while I wasn’t amused that morning, by dinner that night I’d regained some of my sense of humor.
“I want to write an essay about this whole topic of being single at thirty-one,” I explained to my flatmate, Travis, from where I was sitting on a stool behind the kitchen counter while he made both of us dinner. “But I don’t want people to wonder whether I’m just putting a brave face on acute psychic pain.”
“They won’t. They’ll just think you’re being a drama queen, as usual,” Travis reassured me. “But while we’re on the topic, are you putting a brave face on acute psychic pain? I mean, I’m thirty and single and I’m just fine with that. But I think this whole topic is harder for women. There seems to be something about turning thirty that freaks women out. And, let’s face it, I can still have children when I’m seventy if I want to. You can’t.”
*
My first instinct was to issue a quick and emphatic denial in response to Travis’ question about pain.
Sure, being single at thirty-one was not exactly how I had imagined my life playing out when I was in high school. When I was fifteen I had this all sorted. I wouldn’t get married at twenty-one as my parents had. Instead, I’d leave it daringly late and marry at twenty-four. I’d have my first baby at twenty-seven. And I would somehow manage to do all this while being a trauma surgeon and living in Africa.
According to that plan, I am now both off-track and way behind schedule.
But there have been some very good things about my teenage plans’ being turned on their head. If I had married at twenty-four – just after finishing six years of study to qualify as a forensic psychologist – I would not have been free to ring up my parents, confess that I wasn’t that keen anymore on working as a psychologist and ask whether I could come live with them for a while and try my hand at writing novels while I looked for jobs in the humanitarian field.
When one such job opportunity arose, I probably would not have been able to take off on twelve days’ notice to move to Croatia.
After living for a while in the Balkans, I might not have been able to accept a scholarship to spend a year doing another master’s degree in peace studies just because it sounded like fun. Or relocate to California afterward simply because it seemed like a good idea to take a job in Los Angeles as a stress-management trainer for humanitarian workers – a job that keeps me traveling at least one week out of four and sometimes for weeks on end.
I may never have finished my first novel, which I wrote on weekends, when I was beholden to no one but myself.
I would not have had nearly as much time to invest in a wide, rich friendship network that encircles the globe.
All of this I knew, but there was no denying that there had been something about turning thirty that was profoundly unsettling.
*
Right up until I was 29 years 8 months and 14 days old, I thought turning thirty was no big deal. Then I noticed I was preempting the question.
You know, that question.
“How are you feeling
about the big three-0?”
I’d started answering this question before the other person had even finished asking. I’d pull a bland adjective out of thin air – fine, good, great – and deliver it with breezy unconcern.
Then I’d let it sit there.
The other person would usually pause, waiting for me to fill the silence with bright protestations about how I really was fine with the fact that I was turning thirty and still single, with no prospects of popping out babies any time soon, and how it’s all been worth it because I love my job and I wouldn’t trade all the experiences I’ve had in the past ten years for anything. All this was true, but I didn’t like being expected to say it. And when I didn’t oblige with the culturally correct dialogue, the conversation usually moved on.
The day I turned 29 years 8 months and 14 days old, however, the conversation didn’t move on. I looked up to notice that the person who had just asked me the question was staring at me with rather more puzzlement than I thought the answer warranted.
“What?” I said.
“Fine?” she repeated.
“Uh-huh.”
“I ask you how you’re feeling about the situation in Somalia and all you have to say is fine?” she said.
Oh.
This was when I started to get annoyed. I didn’t want to be one of those people who have a crisis about turning thirty. Even now, a year later, I still can’t figure out exactly what might be unsettling me, given that I don’t think the ticking of my biological clock is anywhere near becoming an imperative.
I know it’s possible that I am subconsciously worried about this inexorable biological countdown, but despite offhand comments to family and friends about how I plan to adopt kids if I never get married, I really don’t think it’s my major concern.
When I look at other people’s children, no matter how cute, I still mostly just feel relieved that they’re not mine. This was only underscored by a conversation I had recently with my boss’s wife.
“Oh, little Sam’s getting over his first bad cold,” she said, exhausted, when I asked her how the kids were. “He’s not really sick anymore, just miserable. He’s been hanging off my leg, whining, wanting to be held all the time, and I can’t get anything done.”
“Gee,” I said, “that must make you want to bend down and tell him, ‘Get used to it, buddy, that’s life. You’re going to feel crappy sometimes and people can’t put everything on hold to pay attention to you every time you’re grumpy. Deal with it.’”
“Ummm, no,” she said, clearly making a mental note never to ask me to baby-sit. “It makes me want to pick him up and comfort him.”
No, I don’t feel ready for kids yet. I don’t have that powerful soul-deep hunger to be a mother that I hear some of my girlfriends talk about. I’m not sure I ever will. But I am starting to catch myself wondering sometimes, in a much more abstract fashion, whether I’m going to miss out altogether on those beauties and struggles peculiar to parenthood or on learning how to be genuinely vulnerable in a way I suspect that only the bond of marriage allows. And whether, if I do, I’ll wake up in fifteen years and still believe that it was worth it – this choice that I have made again and again throughout my twenties to pursue adventure and novelty and helping people in faraway lands rather than stability and continuity and helping people in a land I claim as mine.
These are melancholy moments. These are days when I wake up and wonder whether I wouldn’t perhaps feel happier, more fulfilled or less restless on a radically different path. When I would really like to come home to someone who’s vowed to be interested in how my day was. When I just want someone to bring me coffee in bed or rub my shoulders uninvited.
Yet, right alongside these wonderings that sometimes dead-end in visions of my dying alone at ninety lie other wonderings, other fears.
After a nomadic life that has been largely defined by coming and (always, inevitably) going, am I even capable of the sort of commitment demanded by marriage and children and a place called home?
I touched on this confused tangle of longings recently with a girlfriend for whom I was a bridesmaid a decade ago. Jane is now living on a verdant pecan farm in Australia ten miles from my parents’ place, complete with a sweet prince of a husband, two little girls, a dog, two cats, a horse, and a veggie garden.
“You know, I want your life sometimes,” I confessed near the end of our conversation.
Jane laughed. “My brain is turning to mush with no one but the kids to talk to all day, and when you say that you spent – Eloise, I told you to stay at the table while you finished your milk! Sit back down please – when you say that you spent last week in Boston at a conference and you’re off to New York next week, I want your life.”
*
“No,” I said to Travis in our kitchen in Los Angeles that night after thinking for a minute or two about his question. “I don’t often put a brave face on acute pain. I’m happy by myself. Mostly. It’s just that sometimes I wonder about a different life, you know?”
“Yeah,” Travis said, doubtless wondering whether he would ever achieve his dream of making it big as a Hollywood director and be able to quit his day job. “I know all about that. Write about that.”
Los Angeles – Accra – Washington, D.C. – Sydney – Zagreb – South Bend – Nairobi – San Diego – Atlanta – Madang – Kona – Canberra – London – Baltimore – Itonga – Vancouver – Harare – Dushanbe – Lira – Petats – Port Moresby – Brisbane – Ballina – Malibu
Alternate Lives
Los Angeles, USA
When it comes to wondering about a different life, mine is not my parents’ story. Both of them grew up firmly planted on farms in Australia. My father milked cows before and after school, wore hand-me-down clothes, and still talks with emotion of the treat that it was to have roast chicken on Christmas Day. My mother attended the two-room schoolhouse just down the road from their sugar cane farm. Hers was a childhood full of chores, too, but also of fishing in the river across the road and caravanning at the nearby beach every summer. When my parents decided to attend university, they were treading a different path from most of their peers. They were also leaving the only homes they had ever known.
After a childhood of unfathomable stability, marriage to each other at twenty-one, and seven years spent living in Canberra (a strong contender for the planet’s most boring capital city), I can understand why my parents wondered about a different life. I can understand the allure of a radical new path. I can understand – though still I marvel at their naïve bravery – why they decided to pack up their three young children and move to Bangladesh to pursue development work.
My grandparents were less understanding. My mother’s parents even suggested that if they must go, we children should stay with them.
“Don’t worry,” my parents reassured them. “It’s only for two years. Then we’ll be back.”
Twenty-one years and seven international moves later, my parents finally relocated back to Australia. During their time away, they’d weathered two government coups and several emergency evacuations and collected more than their share of interesting experiences. They’d also raised three global nomads who were equally accustomed to spending time in seaside resorts and slums and who felt one part self-assured citizens of the world and two parts outsiders pretty much wherever they went.
This is why I still don’t fully understand my own perpetual wonderings about a different life – I have already had many lives in many places. And the life I now live is the sort of life that my parents left Australia hoping to find in Bangladesh.
I am the director of education and training services for a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing psychological support services to humanitarian workers around the world. When I am not delivering workshops on stress, trauma, and resilience in cities as divergent as Amsterdam or Nairobi, I find myself in Los Angeles. To outside observers interested in this sort of work, I look as if I have it made – a meaningful job with freque
nt travel and a home base in one of the great cities of the developed world. And when I come across these outside observers, often students who are longing to find an entrée into humanitarian work, they all want to know pretty much the same thing.
How did you get your job? How did you get your life?
These, I am afraid, are entirely valid questions without satisfying answers. I often feel as if these students are looking for a set of instructions they can use to map out a clear pathway for themselves. What they get instead, if I’m being honest, is a shrug. For the truth of the matter is, I’m still not entirely sure how I got this job, much less this life that can still feel as if it doesn’t fit me quite right.
Sydney, Australia
When I have the time to give someone the extended version of the pathway to now, I usually begin the story in Sydney, around the time I graduated with a master’s degree in forensic psychology. By this time, after six years of learning to call Australia home and actually mean it, I had figured out that a large part of my heart was still overseas and that I wanted to be an international humanitarian worker.
At least that’s how I put it to my parents when I rang them where they were living at the time to let them know that now that I’d invested all this effort and no small sum of their money into psychology, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a psychologist anymore.
“Why not?” Mum asked reasonably.
“I just feel like I really should be overseas,” I said, stopping just short of claiming divine directive on the topic, “and I don’t want to work in prison again.”
I knew Mum wouldn’t argue with that second point. My parents hadn’t been thrilled when I announced my decision to specialize in forensics. Neither were they charmed upon learning that my first internship would have me spending six months in the maximum-security unit of Australia’s largest prison for men, and I doubt that my subsequent anecdotes about making knives out of toothbrushes and smuggling drugs in tennis balls did all that much to reassure them. They were much happier when I left the prison and moved on to my next rotation, with the state police. Or, at least, they were happy until they found out the types of cases we were regularly called in for: child abuse, sexual assault, shootings, and particularly nasty homicides.